The present invention relates to content delivery to a mobile device, and in particular to providing mobile commerce related content on a mobile device.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The proliferation of Internet-enabled mobile device usage has given rise to business to consumer (B2C) mobile commerce (m-commerce), and indications are that its popularity is to surpass that of B2C electronic commerce (e-commerce). Unlike in e-commerce, the m-commerce environment is very dynamic, for example, different mobile phones with different specifications are used in different locations.
In B2C m-commerce, businesses are able to provide customers with product catalogues on a mobile phone; customers can browse and purchase products using a mobile phone, anytime, anywhere. Conducting business transactions using a mobile phone is becoming very popular because of factors such as convenience, easy connection, ubiquity and cheaper costs of the hardware. Customers are now able to access e-commerce websites using a mobile phone to browse and purchase products. Efficient browsing of the product catalogue is, therefore, viewed as being an important consideration for success in B2C e-commerce and m-commerce, since customers make purchasing decisions based on the product catalogue contents. Accessing a product catalogue in m-commerce using a mobile phone is, however, difficult because there exist a number of physical properties inherent in a mobile phone that make browsing the product catalogue a tedious task for customers. Examples of such mobile phone properties include: low memory, limited processing power, small screen size, and limited user input modes such as small keyboard.
These constrained physical characteristics of mobile phones raise usability problems in an m-commerce environment. A challenge is therefore to provide an optimal way of retrieving and displaying a subset of product catalogue information on a mobile phone, taking into consideration the constraints and opportunities that exist in a mobile environment, without user intervention, or at most with minimal user intervention. Some conventional approaches for solving usability problems in e-commerce include:                Recommender systems: Recommender systems are systems that perform intelligent information filtering and suggest products to online customers. These systems have been utilized in e-commerce to improve the online customers' experiences.        Personalization: Personalization is defined as the use of technology and available customer information to tailor e-commerce interactions between a business and each individual customer. Personalization, in this case, can help to make products offered online more suited to the unique and individual needs of each user.        Customization: Customization is a method that is used to remove the burden of information overload on the part of the user, especially the online user. In a customization process, end-users are given an opportunity to select their requirements from a set of comprehensive options and the businesses provide products and services based on users' explicitly selected requirements.        
These and other issues are addressed by embodiments of the present invention, individually and collectively.